A Learning Experience 2: Hard Lessons (39 page)

Sooner or later, someone will figure out a way to beat teleport jamming
, she thought.  It was, after all, an obvious way to take out a starship. 
And when they do, the universe will change once again
.

Freedom
groaned again as two enemy blasts struck her shields, knocking her out of formation and right towards a third enemy cruiser, which lunged forward.  Yolanda hastily evaded a deliberate attempt to ram her ship, then put some distance between herself and the suicidal crew.  Everyone agreed the Tokomak were brave, if only because they had no real concept of defeat, but no one had suggested they were mad.  But then, trading
Freedom
for one of their escort ships would be highly advantageous – to the enemy.  They could replace their losses far faster than humanity, the Coalition and the Varnar combined.

“The Marines are ready to deploy,” Captain Singh said.  “Find them an ideal target.”

“Yes, sir,” Yolanda said.  Five enemy battleships were heading towards the human formation, firing rapidly enough they were bound to hit
something
, even if their targeting was piss-poor.  “I think I have one right here.”

“Then take us right through their formation,” Captain Singh said.  “And launch ECM drones at the same time.”

“Aye, sir,” Commander Gregory said.

Yolanda thought, briefly, of Martin, then did as she was told.

***

Martin had to call on his implants to avoid panic as soon as he launched himself into space, even though he’d done the operation in simulators often enough to know what he was doing.  There were just so
many
warships nearby, each one capable of swatting him like a bug if it bothered to notice the fire team.  Four Marines simply didn't register on their sensors, not when the ECM drones were hitting them with sensor ghosts and other illusions.  But if they happened to score a lucky hit ...

He remained calm as the Tokomak warship rose up in front of him, a giant gleaming cylinder, glowing with light.  Energy flickered and flared around them as they passed through its shields, then fell to the hull.  As soon as they were on the surface, he led the charge to the airlock and forced it open, allowing the atmosphere to drain out.  This time, he couldn't help noticing the enemy had clearly fixed their airlocks.  This time, the outflow was surprisingly low.  They’d clearly learned
something
from the last battle.

Quickly, he picked up the nuke – so small, for something so destructive – and shoved it into the hull, then banged the airlock closed.  There was no time to waste; they launched themselves off the hull, heading right for the enemy shields.  This time, they might not make it through before it was too late ...

The nuke detonated.  Below him, the enemy craft shuddered and lost power.  Explosions flared out along her hull, although large parts of her remained intact.  She’d been designed to cope with weapons a little bit stronger than nukes, Martin reminded himself; the briefing officers had even suggested that antimatter would have worked better, if there had been enough to go round.  But it hardly mattered.  The Tokomak ship would need years of work in a shipyard before she was back in fighting trim, if they bothered to waste the effort.  Personally, he would have sent her to the yard for scrapping.

“The shuttle is on the way,” Wilson said.  “She’ll take us to the next target.”

Martin nodded, relieved.  The naked eye couldn't see much, apart from flashes of light, but his suit was happily filling in the details.  There were hundreds of starships, fighting and dying, all around him.  He forced himself to look away, then focused on the databursts from the Marines.  Two of the assault teams had been wiped out completely, probably through a lucky shot; a third had made it to their target, then detonated the nuke ahead of time, damaging the ship, but not knocking it out of the fight. 

“So we go do it again,” he said.  The shuttle came into view, a tiny boxy craft, covered with stealth coating that should have made it invisible.  “And again and again, until they wise up.”

A streak of light flashed through space and struck the shuttle, which exploded.  Martin gaped, then hastily pushed himself away from where the craft had been.  He hadn't even seen the enemy ship that had fired the fatal shot!  But it had clearly seen
something
... maybe they’d mistaken the shuttle for an ECM drone or maybe it had been a lucky shot ... it didn't matter, not really.  All that mattered was that they were stranded in the middle of a battlefield.

“Contact Fleet Command,” he ordered.  If the enemy were looking for shuttles now, it was unlikely a second craft would be sent to rescue them.  No ship would risk lowering its teleport shields long enough to snatch them up, not when the enemy would be watching and waiting for such a moment of weakness.  “Inform them of our status and request pickup.”

He closed his eyes for a long moment, then accessed the suit’s sensors once again.  If nothing else, he could watch the battle ... and pray that someone remained alive long enough to pick them up, once the battle was done.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

A privately-funded college was today surrounded by protesters demanding the immediate restoration of a lecturer who was suspended, two weeks ago, for turning his lectures into political seminars.  In a statement issued after the protests began, the College President noted that none of the protestors actually studied at the college and opinion among the student body was largely in favour of the suspension.  However, the lecturer has lodged a claim of political discrimination with the state anti-discrimination body ...

-Solar News Network, Year 53

It was hard, very hard, to tell which side was actually winning.

The Human-Coalition Alliance was inflicting more losses, Mongo was sure, but the Tokomak simply had more ships and firepower.  They could afford to trade ten-for-one indefinitely, if they liked, knowing they could just keep reinforcements flowing down the chain from their homeworld.  In the meantime, humanity would have to replace its losses through new construction and there was no way that could match the deployment of older, but still functional starships.

And then there were the Varnar ...

Their starships were hanging back, avoiding involvement on either side.  Mongo couldn’t tell if they were hedging their bets or if they were waiting for the right moment to stab the Tokomak in the back.  Were they hoping the Tokomak would weaken their rivals first, before they attacked, in the hopes of winning the entire sector?  Humanity was far from the only race to notice just how weak the Tokomak actually were ...

He shook his head, then keyed a switch.  “Inform our Varnar friend that the time has come,” he ordered.  On the display, a human starship blew a Tokomak battleship apart, only to be swatted out of space by a hail of fire from another battleship.  “They need to take a side now or be forever under the Tokomak thumb.”

***

She was winning.

It was slow, very slow, and painful, yet she was winning.  The enemy might have been hurting her fleet – that was unarguable – but she simply had more starships than they did and the promise of far more reinforcements to come.  One by one, the advanced starships were being swatted out of space, smashed to pieces by her firepower.  And the enemy formation was starting to come apart.

Although they might have designed it that way
, she thought.  The Tokomak had envisaged space battles as slow and stately, while the humans had devised battle tactics that relied on speed and decisiveness.  They treated their cruisers as if they were expendable gunboats, each one darting
through
her formations and daring her ships to fire, knowing the risk of hitting their fellows. 
Can I truly count on it
?

But the Coalition fought normally, she saw, and it was slowly losing.  She knew it was humiliating to see her ships perform so badly against their enemies, but she was slowly winning.  Even if her fleet was wiped out, the Coalition wouldn't recover in time before her reinforcements arrived, bent on revenge.  The Proxy War would come to an end as her people imposed direct rule on the troublesome sector.

She leaned forward, then smiled.  “Advance the fleet forward,” she ordered.  “Force them to engage us at close range.”

It was clear the humans hadn't shared their tactics with their allies.  The Coalition ships were as slow and stately as her own – and smaller, too.  Their datanets were better and their weapons more advanced, but they couldn't match the sheer number of weapons crammed into her battleships.  A close-range duel favoured her, even though the enemy had more experience and advanced technology.  And, without the Coalition, the humans would be unable to stand up to their enemies. 

Or maybe the Coalition didn't see the value in their proposed techniques
, she thought. 
They wouldn't want to risk throwing out The Book when The Book helped us win an empire ...

“Your Excellency,” the sensor officer snapped.  “The Varnar are targeting us!”

Neola looked up, shocked.  She’d suspected betrayal, but not in the middle of a battle.

“Raise them,” she snapped.  “Demand to know what they’re doing ...”

“The Varnar have opened fire,” the sensor officer reported.  “And they’re hacking into our datanet!”

“Lock them out,” Neola thundered.  She’d had no choice, but to allow them to link into the datanet, despite the risk.  Now ... it had turned into a disaster.  The Varnar didn't have override authority, in theory, yet they had the access they needed to hack into the main systems and insert viruses.  “Crash and reform the datanet, if necessary.”

She turned her head towards the display.  The Varnar were hammering the rear of her formation, which had been caught completely by surprise.  Demands for orders were popping up in front of her, even as the Varnar pushed their sudden advantage.  And she honestly didn't know what to do. 

“Lock missiles on the planet and fire,” she snapped.  Most of the missiles, perhaps all of them, would be taken out by the defenders, but it would give them something else to think about than merely hammering the rear of her fleet.  “And then converge all of our ships on the gravity point.”

“Yes, Your Excellency,” Captain Drew said.

Neola forced herself to think as her subordinates struggled to obey her orders.  She’d been winning ... now, she was losing, thanks to the Varnar.  She wanted to turn on them, to obliterate them for daring to take a stand, but they’d timed it perfectly.  If she tried to attack their homeworld, she would be obliterated by the combined fleet; if she turned on their ships to the exclusion of all else, she would be destroyed by the Coalition.  There was no option, but retreat.

“And all ships are to put the Varnar on top of their targeting lists,” she added.  There would be time for ruthless extermination later; right now, she would settle for whatever revenge she could get.  “Their ships are to be smashed.”

***

The gravity point was an odd twist in the fabric of space-time; invisible, unsurprisingly, to the naked eye, but all too clear to the starship’s sensors.  Yolanda yanked
Freedom
around the gravity point and took her back towards the battle, just in time to see that the situation had changed completely.  The Varnar had opened fire ... on the Tokomak.  And the Tokomak seemed to be ignoring everyone else, in favour of trying to slaughter the Varnar.

“Interesting,” Captain Singh said.  Missiles were roaring towards Varnar itself, aimed right at the planet’s surface.  “And positively encouraging.”

He paused.  “Take us towards the Tokomak,” he added.  “Right into their midst.”

The Tokomak seemed confused, Yolanda noted, as she obeyed.  She pulled the ship through a series of sweeping evasive tricks, but hardly any of the Tokomak ships bothered to fire on her, even though they knew human ships were deadly.  And their datanet was fragmenting.  Instead of every ship working in unison, they all seemed to have fallen back on their own resources.

“Fire,” Captain Singh ordered.

Yolanda smiled as Commander Gregory opened fire.  The Tokomak fired back, but their shots were badly aimed.  Two of them even grazed their own ships in their confusion, while the human ships opened fire with missiles of their own.  They should have been useless, Yolanda knew, but the Tokomak were too confused to take effective countermeasures.

Behind her, the remainder of the Human-Coalition fleet surged forward, targeting the gravity point.  The Tokomak twisted and turned, but they were caught between two fires; they couldn't turn to deal with one of them without being taken out by the other.  Yolanda would have felt sorry for them, if she hadn't known they’d tried to bombard Earth into radioactive ashes.  Some of their ships were already breaking formation and trying to escape ...

And then waves of twisted gravity shimmered through space.  It wasn't enough to cause damage, but it was enough to prevent a starship from dropping into FTL.  One wave struck the gravity point, disrupting its stability; two starships which attempted to pass through it shattered into debris, which was tossed through space with terrific force.  The Tokomak were trapped.

“We have them, Captain,” Commander Gregory reported.

“Then keep firing until they see sense and surrender,” Captain Singh ordered.  “The battle isn't over yet.”

***

Neola felt cold ice trickling down the back of her spine as she saw the shift in the gravity point.  The Tokomak had always assumed the gravity points were fixed, utterly immutable ... but then, they hadn't been stupid enough to experiment on them.  If they’d somehow shut down a single gravity point, or the whole network, it would have destroyed their empire.  And they had discouraged advanced gravity research, out of fear that someone might manage to do just that ...

... And the humans, it seemed, had made that fear
real
.

She studied the display for a long moment and realised the battle was lost.  The Varnar had tipped the balance in favour of the Human-Coalition Alliance, while the humans had trapped her ships thousands of light years from home.  There was no hope of escape, or of inflicting enough losses to make up for the sheer scale of the defeat.  The Tokomak Empire was in very real trouble.  Once word of
this
defeat reached restive subject races, it wouldn't be long before they too started to rebel.

And her crews, the handful of officers and crewmen who had experience of actually
fighting
would be lost.  It could not be allowed.

“Raise the enemy flagship,” she ordered.  “Tell them we wish to surrender, on terms.”

There was a long pause.  Then messages started blinking up in her display, not from the humans, but from the other ships in the fleet.  None of their commanders seemed willing to believe she would countenance a surrender, no matter what else happened.  The Tokomak didn't surrender to lesser races ... except they had, during the earlier battle.

“I’m picking up a message from the human commander,” the communications officer said.  “They’re willing to accept surrender, but they want us to cease fire at once and hold position.”

“Do so,” Neola ordered. 

She keyed her console, opening a channel to the other ships, as she searched frantically for words.  The Tokomak didn't surrender.  Everyone knew they took surrenders, but never surrendered.  Except they did. 

“This is a direct order from the flag,” she said, finally.  “There is to be no argument, no debate.  The battle is lost.  You are ordered to surrender, if we can get suitable terms, and obey all orders from the humans in line with those terms.  I take full responsibility for ordering the surrender.

“Hold your fire, but keep your shields and jammers up until we come to terms,” she added, keeping her voice even.  The defeat would echo through the empire, until its very foundations were badly shaken.  “Do not engage the enemy any further without my specific authorisation.”

She closed the channel before anyone could respond, then looked over at the communications officer.  “Tell the humans that we would like to surrender in line with standard protocols,” she said.  “And add that I suggest they hurry.”

***

Mongo frowned as the enemy fire came to an end.

“Inform them that they will be taken into POW camps and treated in line with the standard protocols of the Proxy War,” he said.  “But we want their computer datacores intact.”

He settled back in his chair as the message was sent, thinking hard.  He wasn't blind to some of the implications.  It was rare for anyone of significant importance to be captured, which was why prisoner trading took place on a regular basis, but the Tokomak simply didn't have many experienced officers and crewmen.  Returning the captured Tokomak would only make them more dangerous, even if they agreed the returnees wouldn't be allowed to go back to war.  Their other trainees would be able to learn from the ones who had fought and survived.

“They are willing to accept your terms,” the communications officer said.

“Then tell them to drop shields and jammers,” Mongo ordered.  He was surprised; he had expected more of an argument, or perhaps a demand that their surrender be to a specific race in the hopes of causing trouble for the alliance.  “The Marines will be on their way shortly to accept their surrender.”